Education and Antibiotics

It's a common trope that big pharmaceuticals don't have a lot of enthusiasm for developing new antibiotics. Because microbes evolve, the useful life of one of these drugs is limited, and just as bad, antibiotics actually tend to cure problems. This is in contrast to 'maintenance' or 'lifestyle' drugs like blood pressure medicines or Viagra respectively. The demand for those is probably more related to advertising and sales efforts than to underlying conditions, and can be therefore developed into a profit stream that lasts until the patent runs out.

I wonder if higher education isn't doing the same thing? We often use phrases like 'life-long learning' in mission statements, but in fact if that means that students don't need us anymore it's not going to generate us any more revenue. One billboard on my commute reads "Come for the Bachelor's, Stay for the Master's." The Dept. of Education seems to buy into this vision, as does the Lumina Foundation, with goals for college completion to increase. But does life-long learning really mean paying tuition for the rest of your life? As a business model, it's hard to argue with. We can keep inventing degrees and diluting the market with higher and higher credentials to produce demand for ever more elite educational status. That's cynical, and I don't mean that this is happening intentionally, but successful strategies tend to emerge out of chaos via evolutionary pathways.


One obvious opportunity is a new degree between a Master's and a PhD. The latter is too big a jump, so splitting it in half would be an economic win. What's halfway between a 'master' and a 'doctor?' Perhaps "'Advanced Master's" or AM degree? No, A stands for Associates, and that won't do. Better for marketing purposes to borrow from the other direction: perhaps PhM, for Master of Philosophy. I know it's ugly, but just like that stain on the carpet, you'll get used to it eventually.

For-Profit and No-Profit

They may be converging. From The Chronicle:

While officials at for-profit colleges anxiously await the release of regulations that could limit borrowing by their students, rumors about the content and timing of the new rules abound.

Here's the picture to go with it. American Public's Walmart bounce is evident.

In other news,  alternatives to for-pay education are maturing. This New York Times piece sums up the choices, with links.

And this one sums up the Edupunk movement, including Peer-to-Peer University.  Quote:

P2PU’s mission isn’t to develop a model and stick with it. It is to “experiment and iterate,” says Ms. Paharia, the former executive director of Creative Commons. She likes to talk about signals, a concept borrowed from economics. “Having a degree is a signal,” she says. “It’s a signal to employers that you’ve passed a certain bar.” Here’s the radical part: Ms. Paharia doesn’t think degrees are necessary. P2PU is working to come up with alternative signals that indicate to potential employers that an individual is a good thinker and has the skills he or she claims to have — maybe a written report or an online portfolio.

Some of my own ideas about that last thought are found in "Getting Rid of Grades."

Shorting Higher Ed

There are stirrings lately that the Edu-bubble--putative over-leveraging of higher ed--is about to burst. For some time, the narrative in the press has been that a four-year degree is overpriced, typically with graphs that show average tuition and fees. Here's one from Money magazine last year (graph on left).

This one was cited byt Glenn Reynolds in a Washington Examiner article "Higher education's bubble is about to burst":

College has gotten a lot more expensive. A recent Money magazine report notes: "After adjusting for financial aid, the amount families pay for college has skyrocketed 439 percent since 1982. ... Normal supply and demand can't begin to explain cost increases of this magnitude."

I'm not sure he noticed the Money article was a year old. He gives no proximate cause for thinking the bubble is pop-worthy.

There have been others, for example in the New York Times. I summarized and commented on some of these in this post in November 2009.  It's a popular sport to find examples of recent graduates with mountains of debt and figure out where the blame goes. For example, this article in the New York Times:

[...] Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she’s been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments. This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning.

I speculated that at some point we'd start to see discount online colleges, and compared it to a merger of University of Phoenix and Wal*Mart. That doesn't seem to have happened yet, but Wal*Mart has bought into the current prices in bulk. In The Washington Post article "Wal-Mart partners with online school to offer college credit to workers" Ylan Mui writes that " [I]n classic Wal-Mart fashion, the company negotiated a 15 percent tuition reduction on other courses at APU in exchange for handling some administrative and marketing duties." This is from American Public University, where their website quotes prices up to $300/credit, which is about the going rate for coursework.

Is this too high? If you imagine a three-credit course with 20 students enrolled, each paying the $300 per credit, that's a total revenue of $18,000 for the course. The instructor may cost $3000, and the infrastructure a few hundred. A large amount goes to advertising, and there's some administrative overhead. The rest is profit. From the article:

American Public University is one of a growing number of so-called career colleges that operate on a for-profit model, rather than as state institutions or private foundations. APU's parent company is publicly traded and its reported revenue jumped 43 percent to $47.3 million during the most recent quarter, while profit rose 46 percent to $7.6 million.

A large part of this profit comes from the federal government in the form of grants and guaranteed loans. (See this article for details.) There is noise now about changing the rules to cut off this geyser of public money going into the pockets of shareholders. Steve Eisman, who bet against the mortgage industry and won, is quoted in Mother Jones in "Steve Eisman's Next Big Short: For-Profit Colleges":

In a speech titled "Subprime Goes to College," delivered Wednesday at the Ira Sohn Investment Research Conference, Eisman blasted the for-profit education industry, likening these companies to the seamy mortgage brokers who peddled explosive subprime loans over the past two decades.

This is political, of course. The for-profits seem to have enamored themselves to the Republicans, who are perhaps hoping to privatize all of education. The Chronicle has an article about a review panel of 18 individuals...

[...] that reviews accrediting groups. And the stark divisions among those named to the panel does not bode well for a unified or harmonious approach to its task when it begins meeting again this year after a two-year hiatus.

Agendas are clear from the nominations:

Congressional Republicans, naming a third of the committee's members, mostly chose panelists from the business world or for-profit colleges but no one currently serving at a traditional nonprofit institution. The GOP appointments include Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, who served on a previous version of Naciqi and was one of the most outspoken advocates for colleges to show greater evidence of student achievement and for accreditors to require such evidence in their standards.

Republicans also named two leaders of proprietary colleges to the committee: Arthur E. Keiser, chancellor of Keiser University, and William J. Pepicello, president of the University of Phoenix.

Congressional Democrats, by contrast, chose four of their six members from the ranks of public colleges, along with the former chancellor of the University of California at Davis.

So Republicans are for private, for-profit education and for standardized testing. Democrats are supporting the old creaky model of higher education. This doesn't bode well for reasoned debate. 


The Dept of Ed is casting about for new models.  In this article in The Chronicle, Secretary Duncan is quoted as saying that

his hope is to reallocate money from other federal programs, which he didn't name, and use it to offer financial incentives to colleges that show creativity in containing costs and improving their graduation rates.

Huffington Post article lists one possible remedy:

In January, the Education Department suggested one answer: for a program to be eligible [for public money], a majority of its graduates' annual student loan payments under a 10-year repayment plan must be no more than 8 percent of the incomes of those in the lowest quarter of their respective professions. The earnings data would come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This is the kind of measure I've been asking for for years--actual data on how students do in the marketplace after graduation.  This would do more than anything to illuminate the debate about the worth of education.

Higher Ed News

I cleaned up the higher ed news page (link on left,  or click here) to include more news items.  I thought it was time to get rid of the google trends graph on financial aid.  I replace two minor sources with reddit's education page and one from delicious.com.  There are no ads, of course.  It runs on google docs, yahoo pipes, and rss feeds from the sources.

Using up the Oxygen

A while back I speculated that a large cut-rate online university might evolve to vacuum up the vast market of students who don't make the cut at more traditional four-year institutions.  I called it Cyberdon Rex.  This thundering beast still hasn't made an appearance, but the atmosphere of higher education is changing anyway, and rapidly.  According to this PBS Frontline piece entitled College, Inc., the privates are rolling in the cash:

And the cash cow of the for-profit education industry is the federal government. Though they enroll 10 percent of all post-secondary students, for-profit schools receive almost a quarter of federal financial aid.

They also generate a disproportionate amount of defaulted loan debt, according to the introduction.   Of course, all this might be worth it if the economic return to the economy in the grand scale tips the scales back.  Is that the case?  That's a difficult question for the federal government to address, and front and center there will be learning outcomes. 

We should expect two things: more limited PELL grants, as the privates suck the oxygen out.  Or at least pressure to stop the bleeding from government coffers.  Secondly, this could easily increase pressure for some kind of standardized learning outcomes test, like NCLB, so that colleges really can be compared (so the theory goes), and those who flunk lose accreditation and hence federal aid.  This would be a terrible waste, I think.  But it behooves us to get in front of this with alternative proposals.  I think the most direct one is a pitch I've made before: ask the government to provide us with employment figures for our graduates using IRS data.  Then we can make direct arguments about the economic impact of degrees.  Anything less than that is a proxy.  Why even look for a proxy when the real information is there?

Disasters of Entitlement

A title is a dangerous thing to have. I had an apocryphal friend once who was talked into being promoted to Director of Learning. The poor guy never had a moment's rest after that--always taking calls from students who didn't feel like they were getting their learning per buck, professors who thought the students weren't learning, and on one occasion, the Secretary of Education demanding a graph showing where the two intersected.

His sin, you see, was to accept a title that was too general. People glom onto titles like a lottery ticket and come to the poorly-titled slob for the cashing in.

Riiinnnnng

Yes?

Is this the Director of International Stuff?

Well, er--

--so here's my problem: my cousin's kid's passport expired while he was out of the country. Oh, and where can I get one of those cool European stickers that will make people think I'm from Estonia?

You get the idea.

The worst possible title is Director of Stuff. No matter how much pay increase they offer, you want to politely decline this offer. Since everything consists of "stuff" in one way or another, you'll be responsible for all that ails the institution without a budget or personal trainer to get you through the rough patches. Of course, very occasionally something useful arrives on your desk as a result of a bad title, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

When my title was Assistant Professor of Mathematics, I got a detailed letter from an inventor showing how his formula to generate the digits of pi could be used as a data compression algorithm, and thereby produce a dialing system so that everyone on the planet could have a one-digit phone number. You can see how useful that would be.

But most attention generated from a too-general title is just annoying, and wastes time that could be more productively spent sipping a latte.

The solution is to ask for an obscure and specific title. I've been stuck with Dean of Academic Support Services for the last few months (a title I've learned that I shouldn't abbreviate), but when I can get away with it I announce myself as Dean of Exotic Plumbing. I think you can see why. Aside from a leaky water fountain request, I get little extra attention from the switch. On the other hand, it has completely cleared up a whole range of other phone calls I used to get about the library having caught afire and other such distractions.

So for your use, I have included a selection of useful suggestions for new titles to replace a couple of common ones that are too general.

Instead of Library Director, use Director of Dust Mite Retention. Rather than Chief Academic Officer, Vice President for Rodentia is a big improvement. And of course, President should become something like Senior Assistant to the President for Undetermined Tasks.

This last one is particularly clever because the President can claim only to take tasks from himself, and then only if they are undetermined. As an exercise you can see how to apply that self-referential concept to your own title, and forever insulate yourself from the mission creep that happens from being in charge of stuff.

[Also: The Secret Life of Committees]

Higher Ed News Page

I have an html document on my desktop that contains my most-used links. I find this easier to use and quicker than the bookmark system. But still, it would be nice to have my higher ed news sources all in one spot, I thought. I used to use 24eyes.com regularly to browse RSS feeds, but at some point my cookies must have expired because I lost all my feeds. Also, you can't log in from a different computer, so it's limited. However, it's very slick, and if you want a starter set of higher ed feeds (audaciously including my own blog), go to 24eyes to get a starter page and then click this link to create the Higher Ed tab. I renamed the original "entertainment" tab, and their server still thinks that's what it is. It's not--it's higher ed news with a technology slant. Note: 24eyes currently has a DNS issue in that you have to have the "www" in front or it won't route properly. This is a problem because the automated URLs from the site lack the prefix.

I created a plain HTML file with the same feeds here. It's not pretty but it works. It tried for a good half hour to get rid of the underlining using CSS, but gave up. Enjoy!